LEAKED: Microsoft has a new tool to help automate your life

Meet Microsoft
Flow: A free way to connect all of your cloud services
— including Slack, GitHub, Twitter, and Google Drive
— together in new and novel ways.

You can have your Dropbox files automatically copied to a
OneDrive account. You can have your Tweets saved to a
spreadsheet. If you've ever used the
mega-popular IFTTT service, it's exactly like that, with
user-created "flows" for shunting data from one service to
another.

Even more interestingly, it looks like we first found out about
Flow before Microsoft was ready: The annunciatory
blog post, dated April 27th 2016, was publicly viewable as of
Wednesday afternoon, but the main flow.microsoft.com site
didn't yet work. Both the blog and the site were first
noticed by Twitter user "h0x0d."

Here's the key image from that blog post:

Microsoft

It also includes example "flows," like this one:

My manager emails me a lot, but with all the email I get, it’s
easy easy to miss an email or. Luckily, it’s very easy to create
a flow that sends me a text message whenever my boss sends me an
email.

Or this one:

My friends will tell you I’m not very adept at social media, so
to help me keep on top of it I’m integrating Tweets with a tool I
am familiar with (Excel). I have a flow set up that searches for
tweets about Microsoft Flow and saves them into an Excel file
that I can review on my own time. You can even save tweets to
SQL[...]

That same blog post explains that Flow is based on a tool
originally introduced alongside
Microsoft PowerApps last November as a closed preview. Now,
it's free and open to everyone, so maybe give it a shot. If
nothing else, it's a great sign of Microsoft's continued
willingness to work with outside companies.